Welcome to the Art & Science repository for the academic year 2025/26. Here you will find a growing collection of teaching-related materials such as lecture presentations, literature, and media. In a separate section, you can also access the repository dedicated to this year’s topic: Memory.
25/26 YEARLY TOPIC: Memory
Memory is more than recollection – it is a dynamic system of encoding, storage, and retrieval that operates across individual, collective, biological, and technological realms. It is the architecture of identity, the scaffold of knowledge, and the engine of both trauma and healing. For the coming year, we propose to explore memory not as a passive archive, but as an active, constructed, and often contested phenomenon that binds together the arts and the sciences in profound ways.
From a biological perspective, memory begins in the synapses – the microscopic junctions where neurons communicate. The encoding of experience into long-term memory involves complex biochemical and electrical processes, a dance of molecules that scientists are only beginning to fully understand. Yet memory is also inherently fragile: prone to distortion, erasure, and reinvention. Neuroscience reveals that every act of remembering is also an act of reconstruction, influenced by context, emotion, and expectation – blurring the boundary between what was and what is imagined.
Equally, memory is inseparable from narrative. We are how we remember, and how we tell our memories – in words, images, gestures – shapes who we are. The act of recounting a life, a community, or an event transforms experience into identity. This raises questions: is the “narrative self” a psychological fact or a cultural construct? How do stories of the past become scripts for self-optimisation, for political positioning, or for artistic reinvention? In this field, creative writing, image theory, and performance become laboratories for exploring memory’s poetic, persuasive, and sometimes manipulative force.
Images and representations also play a decisive role in how events are remembered. Photographs, films, and media accounts do not simply depict but actively shape what counts as significant, who is visible, and how responsibility is assigned. Retelling or re-seeing an event can shift its meaning – sometimes radically – altering not only our understanding of the past but also our orientation to the future. Artistic practice engages with this power of representation by testing how memory can be reframed, questioned, or resisted.
Memory also lives outside us – in monuments, libraries, digital platforms, and data infrastructures. From the Stele of the Vultures in Mesopotamia to the cloud servers of today, societies have devised external supports for remembering, often bound to authority and control. In our present, algorithmic systems increasingly profile and predict us based on structured data, turning memory into a tool of governance and surveillance. Yet external archives can also be re-appropriated: artists, communities, and activists create counter- histories that challenge official narratives, finding ways to reclaim memory’s emancipatory potential.
Culturally, memory is never neutral. It is embedded in rituals, institutions, and media – and shaped by power. What societies choose to remember (or forget) tells us as much about their aspirations as their anxieties. Public monuments, museums, and school curricula act as containers of officially sanctioned memory, while counter-memories emerge in protest, subversion, or silence. The politics of memory is as urgent today as ever, especially in relation to decolonisation, climate grief, digital obsolescence, and intergenerational trauma.
Philosophically, memory occupies a central place in questions of selfhood, time, and truth. Is the self continuous, or merely a story we tell ourselves based on remembered fragments? Thinkers from Augustine to Freud to Stiegler have proposed that memory is not just a faculty of the mind but the very ground of consciousness – and perhaps even of history itself. Here, the terrain becomes speculative, poetic, and ontological.
This year’s exploration of memory invites personal inquiry and collective reflection. Projects may focus on autobiographical memory, ecological memory, technological archiving, ritual practices of remembrance, or the aesthetics of forgetting. The aim is not to define memory, but to use it as a conceptual lens – a medium through which connections between disciplines, materials, and meanings can be forged.
As with last year’s topic “colour”, memory is not just a theme but a framework – a structure within which students are encouraged to explore freely, critically, and inventively. It provides a scaffold for cross-disciplinary investigation, a bridge between sensation and speculation, biology and narrative, data and dream. In short: a fertile ground for thinking, making, and remembering differently.
LITERATURE related to Memory
1) Books & Theoretical Texts Science & Philosophy
Matter and Memory (Henri Bergson, 1896)
Bergson links perception, duration, and memory, arguing that memory is not a mere storage but an active relation between consciousness, body, and world. Bridging philosophy and nascent psychology, he reframes recollection as a creative process shaping the present, profoundly influencing Proust, James, and later phenomenology. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eTb-dXNJ5wwrHMOGvtIvwbGHmQY7tcog
In Search of Memory (Eric Kandel, 2006)
Nobel laureate Kandel interweaves the biology of memory (synaptic plasticity, Aplysia, long- term potentiation) with autobiography – Vienna, exile, and postwar return. A lucid account of how neuroscience reshaped our understanding of learning and remembering, and how personal history and scientific discovery entwine. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FQNIvPGGHYdBJCpiGkFhEqyilkr__IVe
The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (Catherine Malabou, 2012)
Malabou argues that neurotrauma produces transformations of identity irreducible to classical psychoanalysis. Connecting brain injury with sociopolitical trauma, she shows how memory, plasticity, and subjectivity intersect – challenging philosophy and clinical practice to rethink wounds that reconfigure who a person becomes. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G1uj9UrEAxHvYn07p88Y8hp2CGabrVGO
2) Cognitive Psychology
Eyewitness Testimony (Elizabeth Loftus, 1979; revised eds.)
Loftus demonstrates how stress, bias, and leading questions distort recall, even implanting false memories. A foundational text that changed legal psychology and police procedure, it remains essential for understanding the malleability of memory and the limits of testimony in courts and everyday life. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1HsDQQQGICH-NEsdcbv__-yxhkYIgJK64
Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (Daniel Schacter, 1996)
Schacter synthesises cognitive and neuropsychological research to explain how memory works – and fails. From amnesia to Alzheimer’s, recovered and false memories, he shows how remembering is constructive, selective, and identity-defining, blending case studies with clear science writing. https://drive.google.com/file/d/14lYYYVuucFm_uzOsjWTdnoZOkNezao8q
The Seven Sins of Memory (Daniel Schacter, 2001; 20th-anniv. update 2021)
Schacter identifies memory’s “sins” – absent-mindedness, transience, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, persistence – arguing they are adaptive features of a flexible system. The anniversary edition extends the analysis to digital life, misinformation, and how networked media reshape remembering and forgetting. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h0sY5OpvghyQ46bxL8Z8cIwrkTn5HcNC
3) Art, Memory and Archive
Memory and Political Change (Aleida Assmann & Linda Shortt, 2011)
Essays on how collective memory hinders or enables transitions from authoritarian rule to democracy. Through case studies and theory, the volume shows memory as both obstacle and resource in reconfiguring public life and institutions. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eCMyGuKkeGZdFXRvrV-XO4YF8WX7WLlz
Memory in a Global Age (Aleida Assmann & Sebastian Conrad (eds.), 2010)
A key intervention in global memory studies. The contributors trace how memories circulate across borders via media, migration, and diplomacy, linking Holocaust memory, globalisation, and international cultural politics. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BHulnhb4T-hSwOo3_8wWh2glXYl_jfJp
Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Jacques Derrida, 1996)
Derrida explores archives as sites of power, desire, technology, and law. Reading Freud alongside electronic media, he shows how archiving practices shape public/private memory and how digitisation transforms what, and how, we remember.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1_hPz0bl3dWW_d7dVz6_McuOxCGkeEB8-
Images in Spite of All (Georges Didi-Huberman, 2008)
A close reading of four clandestine Auschwitz photographs. Didi-Huberman argues for their ethical necessity while acknowledging limits of representation, showing how images can bear witness to violence without resolving its unrepresentability.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TNpBFpPoQt_Bo8xvm0H20Fmx20OpOlzH
The Generation of Postmemory (Marianne Hirsch, 2012)
Hirsch theorises “postmemory” – how children of survivors inherit traumatic histories through images, stories, and affects. Across literature and visual art, she probes the ethics and aesthetics of transmitting histories one did not directly live. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PyLvtIg4r5k5X3Km4z08RnBX4p7GFoiH
Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Andreas Huyssen, 2003)
Huyssen examines how cities (Berlin, Buenos Aires, New York) stage memory through monuments, media, and urban design. He shows how globalisation reconfigures remembrance, where forgetting and memorialising contend in contested public spheres.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-zcsUyUlbzKt3bWyQoS70DetRmDFiMZ5
An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (Annette Kuhn, 2002) Using oral histories and reception studies, Kuhn explores 1930s cinemagoing as lived cultural memory. She shows how cinema shaped identities, fantasies, and social life under austerity, illuminating spectatorship’s role in collective remembrance. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tU9qI1-wdaUjO9lgvvsYVpXj5UUl2tT8
The Archive and the Repertoire (Diana Taylor, 2003)
Taylor contrasts the document-based archive with the repertoire of embodied performance. She shows how gestures, ritual, and live arts transmit cultural memory outside writing, offering a crucial framework for performative remembrance. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XKcRm_qrF224nYeY-Nj9bl0GFuAFr3S2
Deep Time of the Media (Siegfried Zielinski, 2006)
A media-archaeological journey from antiquity to the avant-garde. Zielinski excavates “deep time” to reveal forgotten experiments and devices, arguing that media history unfolds via ruptures and detours – reframing how present technologies remember the past. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CODwoL94vYUpLVameajssOfqLnQcERqd
4) Digital Memory & Critical data Studies
Programmed Visions (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, 2011)
Chun connects memory to code and repetition, showing how software inscribes habits and ideology. She reframes digital memory as programmed persistence – automating what is kept, what recurs, and how power operates in infrastructures. https://drive.google.com/file/d/10wk200pFAm2nYL6tG-Nha9n_-k1hyvb9
New Dark Age (James Bridle, 2018)
Bridle argues that contemporary computation often produces opacity, misinformation, and climate blindness rather than clarity. A sharp critique of how digital infrastructures destabilise memory, knowledge, and political imagination. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fq4ZF4FCsCXfwSfsLTemEin2ZsOx8jjr
5) Media, Curation & Tech-based Practice
Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (Sarah Cook & Beryl Graham, 2010)
A guide to presenting, documenting, and preserving interactive and system-based artworks. It reframes curating as managing processes, versions, and contexts – key for remembering practices that exceed object-based paradigms. https://drive.google.com/file/d/17MrtFCshymXYAa-XpAR38PNaTHyZMcS7
Curating Lively Objects Exhibitions Beyond Disciplines (Lizzie Muller (ed.), 2021)
This book explores exhibitions as dynamic encounters, where objects act, respond, and transform. Interdisciplinary perspectives reveal curating as a practice beyond display— bridging art, science, technology, and lived experience. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K314NaghTibMiHrQFv9D5AiRRSecFfdj
6) Fiction
Austerlitz (W. G. Sebald, 2001)
Following a Kindertransport survivor piecing together his past, Sebald fuses prose and photographs into a meditation on memory, exile, and the difficulty of retrieving a life erased by twentieth-century catastrophe. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cmOrPAMtypjDASX1pig1r4LAqd__r7DW (EN version) https://drive.google.com/file/d/1F1wQDuxUuDC7gwvwnVPZbLbRxeqRtDrr (DE version)
The Buried Giant (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2015)
In a mythic Britain shrouded by communal forgetting, an elderly couple’s journey probes love, violence, and whether societies must remember painful truths to live ethically – or whether forgetting sustains peace. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MEC1r6sS_SAOOj2Ppbecnnmjk2_0ZtFG
7) Practice-based & Experimental
Forensic Architecture. Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth (2021)
A methodology for evidencing violence through open-source video, satellite data, and spatial analysis. Shows how images and sensors become archives of struggle, reframing memory as collective investigation and civic practice. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MyHF6AsCcknikwHZiBYCVRe1ekCR72MP
The Wretched of the Screen (Hito Steyerl, 2012)
Steyerl’s essays trace images through global capitalism, war, and networks. She examines how screens trap and mobilise memory, revealing new forms of visibility, labour, violence – and possibilities for critical art. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rRmAKpLmmUfEolBTqP6RgGGGtYF9qROo
8) Further Reading
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Oliver Sacks, 1985)
Case histories that illuminate neurological disorders of memory and perception. With empathy and narrative clarity, Sacks shows how brain damage reshapes identity, revealing memory’s strangeness and resilience. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1occU1RYbruHmpbjzBBL7Xwc7ZA55cOy4
Regarding the Pain of Others (Susan Sontag, 2003)
On how images of war are seen, circulated, and remembered. Sontag interrogates spectatorship’s ethics and the ambivalence of photography’s role in collective memory and political feeling. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1amUK_Zdoc6zbkE2upPySHKmpAtqi3EyE
If This Is a Man (Primo Levi, 1947)
Levi’s testimony of Auschwitz is central to postwar memory. With precision and moral clarity, he reflects on survival, witnessing, and the responsibility to remember atrocities without simplifying them. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1plnCnAjxCF0_SU0kJsjMmhD5PPESxNdu
More to come…
⇒ For all available e-books click here
MOVIES related to Memory
Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942)
Amnesia severs a man from his past and from love; chance and recognition struggle to repair what forgetting erased. Memory appears as both a wound and a bridge between lives. https://vimeo.com/1111470761/b9404f473a
Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)
Dreamlike repetition, doubling, and shifting perspective dissolve boundaries between recall and desire. Deren stages memory as an unstable loop where symbols return, mutate, and rewrite the self.
https://vimeo.com/547872410/fc5a92088b
It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946)
Capra’s classic turns memory into a moral compass: when George Bailey sees a version of the world without him, collective memory reveals the deep entanglement between personal choices, communal bonds, and the narratives that give a life meaning. Kitsch-Alarm! https://vimeo.com/1111474777/0b90a9eee8
Somewhere in the Night (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946)
A noir detective without a past hunts his own identity. Memory becomes a crime scene: missing, dangerous, continually deferred – proof that forgetting creates plots as powerful as remembering.
https://vimeo.com/1111456641/03efad483d
Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945)
A psychiatrist aids an amnesiac accused of murder, blending psychoanalysis, trauma, and dream imagery. Hitchcock explores how memory, repression, and love intersect in the recovery of truth. Most famously the dream sequences were designed by Salvador Dalí. https://vimeo.com/1111194373/a361522d44
Toute la mémoire du monde (Alain Resnais, 1956)
Inside the Bibliothèque Nationale, books become prosthetic memories. Resnais maps an archival labyrinth where culture remembers itself and the boundary between preservation and imprisonment grows thin.
https://vimeo.com/809129417/1b39c1c622
Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)
A love story interwoven with the trauma of Hiroshima, where personal and collective memory collide in haunting images. Resnais shows how memory can both heal and fracture intimacy.
https://vimeo.com/1111498635/a9c4410207
Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, 1964)
A disturbed young woman compulsively steals and deceives, haunted by repressed trauma. When her new husband uncovers her secrets, Marnie spirals into a tense psychological battle between memory, desire, and control.
https://vimeo.com/1111487158/9fdbbae60e
Seconds (John Frankenheimer, 1966)
A man receives a new face and life, only to discover the past persists. The film interrogates whether identity can survive when memory is engineered, erased, or replaced. https://vimeo.com/559161210/2abd04ec91
Je t’aime, Je t’aime (Alain Resnais, 1968)
A time experiment traps a man inside scattered moments of an old love. Memory appears as recursive, involuntary montage – tender, unreliable, and resistant to linear redemption. https://vimeo.com/779389454/315e75432e
(nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971)
Photographs burn while a misaligned narration recalls them. Image and voice fall out of sync, showing memory as belated, constructed, and always slipping from the evidence that anchors it.
https://vimeo.com/407319751/6ae2e10b50
Ulysse (Agnès Varda, 1982)
Varda revisits a 1954 photograph with its subjects. Competing recollections reveal how time rewrites images – memory is not stored but negotiated through looking, telling, and forgetting.
https://vimeo.com/407314212/99f31acaba
Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982)
Replicants’ implanted memories ask whether fabricated pasts can still ground identity. Humanity is measured by recollection – precious, contested, and perhaps counterfeit. And yes: do androids dream of electric sheep?
https://vimeo.com/1110939660/1f737b280d
White Dog (Samuel Fuller, 1982)
A dog conditioned to attack Black people embodies learned violence. Memory takes the form of training and trauma inscribed into bodies, questioning whether unlearning is possible. A
stark, unsettling film about racism – nothing for the faint of heart.
https://vimeo.com/426920065/7e7bb54808
Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983)
A globe-spanning essay of letters and images where memory drifts across places and formats. Marker composes remembrance as montage: tender, unreliable, and made of recordings and dreams.
https://vimeo.com/824119910/2241f3c60b
Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)
Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic blurs the line between implanted and lived memory. The protagonist’s quest raises the unsettling question of whether identity rests on “real” experiences or on fabricated recollections designed to feel true. https://vimeo.com/1111284109/92983ffa1c
Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993)
Living the same day, only memory accumulates. Repetition becomes pedagogy: the loop transforms narcissism into care, showing change as the slow work of remembering differently.
https://vimeo.com/811298959/eb7ffa5ad8
Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000)
A man with anterograde amnesia tattoos clues on his body. Told backwards, the film makes narration mimic memory’s fracture – knowledge arrives late and trust collapses. https://vimeo.com/1111081879/b5baf4275d
Decasia (Bill Morrison, 2002)
Decomposing nitrate film turns decay into image. The medium’s own mortality becomes a meditation on memory’s perishability – what survives is the beauty of disappearance. https://vimeo.com/1110970203/4aa6699891
Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2004)
An autobiographical collage of home videos, photographs, and pop debris. Memory becomes self-portrait – raw, mediated, and stitched from personal archives that both heal and hurt. https://vimeo.com/1047038714/415212d705
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
A couple erases their shared past, only to rediscover love while memories collapse. Forgetting is tempting, remembering is painful – both are essential to who we are. https://vimeo.com/1111010368/a9f4177919
The Halfmoon Files (Philip Scheffner, 2007)
WWI sound recordings of colonial prisoners haunt the present. The film listens to archives as restless memory, exposing whose voices are preserved and whose histories are silenced. https://vimeo.com/martinreinhart/halfmoon
La Isla: Archives of a Tragedy (Uli Stelzner 2009)
In Guatemala’s recovered police archives, hidden histories of surveillance and repression resurface. Memory becomes forensic evidence, exposing state terror while survivors reclaim
voices silenced by decades of violence and fear.
https://vimeo.com/1113891498/61a6b92f62
Remains – Omokage (Maki Satake, 2010)
Family photos and objects blur into dreamlike montage. Satake reveals how images outlive their subjects, carrying residues that make absence strangely present. https://vimeo.com/407247787/63df8dffbc?fl
Nostalgia for the Light (Patricio Guzmán, 2010)
Astronomers study ancient light while families search the Atacama for the disappeared. Cosmic time and political trauma entwine; memory becomes archaeological – of stars and bones.
https://vimeo.com/1111107006/914c3b55a8
Uncle Boonmee who can recall his Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010) Dying in rural Thailand, Uncle Boonmee encounters ghosts, spirits, and visions of past incarnations. Memory dissolves into myth, blurring lives, deaths, and dreams in a luminous meditation on existence.
https://vimeo.com/1111562276/bf01e245b5
Before I Go to Sleep (Rowan Joffé, 2014)
Waking without memory each day, a woman reconstructs her life through notes and recordings. The thriller probes how fragile memory is – especially when others script it. https://vimeo.com/1111558189/55268f5849
Still Alice (Richard Glatzer, Wash Westmoreland, 2014)
A renowned linguistics professor faces early-onset Alzheimer’s, watching her language and identity slip away. The film poignantly explores memory’s fragility, dignity in decline, and the struggle to hold onto selfhood.
https://vimeo.com/1111570675/937c175e3b
45 Years (Andrew Haigh, 2015)
A long marriage unravels when a hidden past resurfaces. Old love letters and memories reopen wounds, blurring intimacy and estrangement in this quiet, devastating meditation on time, loss, and trust.
https://vimeo.com/1111553991/631ebf5ca7
Austerlitz (Sergei Loznitsa, 2016)
Shot at former Nazi concentration camps turned tourist sites, the film observes visitors with unflinching distance, revealing how collective memory is staged, consumed, and commodified – an uncomfortable view on human dignity, memory and compassion. https://vimeo.com/1111585098/effe8c50da
The Father (Florian Zeller, 2020)
Dementia becomes a cinematic form: rooms shift, faces change, chronology dissolves. The film immerses us in memory’s collapse and the emotional labour of loving within it. https://vimeo.com/929156945/8108c50c48?fl
More to come…
⇒ For all available movies click here
ARTWORKS & ARTISTIC PROJECTS related to Memory
1) Machine Memory & Algorithmic Archives
Memo Akten. Learning to See (2019)
A neural net “sees” live camera input only through what it has learned before, overlaying reality with dataset memories. The piece reveals how machine memory is pattern-based, partial, and biased – always recognising through prior training rather than neutral vision. www.memo.tv/works/learning-to-see
Sougwen Chung. Drawing Operations Unit: MEMORY (2017)
Chung collaborates with a robotic arm trained on her historical drawing gestures. The system “remembers” and imitates her style, blurring authorship and embodiment while asking how creative memory circulates between human motor habits and machine models. https://sougwen.com/project/drawingoperations-memory
Mimi Ọnụọha. The Library of Missing Datasets (2016)
An evolving index of systemic absences: categories that institutions do not collect. By archiving what is unarchived, Ọnụọha exposes how power shapes memory infrastructures – whose lives count, which traces persist, and how forgetting is engineered. https://mimionuoha.com/the-library-of-missing-datasets
Zach Blas. Facial Weaponization Suite (2011–2014)
Collectively produced masks aggregate faces into amorphous forms that confound biometric systems. Refusing legibility, the works challenge surveillance memory at its source – where identity is codified, extracted, and stored without consent. https://zachblas.info/works/facial-weaponization-suite
Hito Steyerl. How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (2013)
A darkly funny “tutorial” on disappearing under ubiquitous capture. Steyerl shows how resolution regimes organise visibility and memory, proposing strategies for opacity in a world that archives by default. www.youtube.com/watch?v=yucoGrSuG50
Ryoji Ikeda. datamatics (2006–ongoing)
Data becomes sensory architecture – sound and light mapping computational structures beyond human scale. Ikeda confronts viewers with the beauty and terror of digital memory: fragmentary, immense, and often incomprehensible to human perception. https://www.ryojiikeda.com/project/datamatics
Joy Buolamwini. AI, Ain’t I A Woman? (2018)
A video poem demonstrating how commercial facial recognition fails to register Black women accurately. Buolamwini exposes algorithmic memory as exclusionary and biased, urging standards and accountability in machine “seeing.” www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxuyfWoVV98
Kate Crawford & Trevor Paglen. Excavating AI (2019)
A critical investigation of training datasets that shape computer vision – revealing how categories, labels, and images encode politics and prejudice. It shows that what machines “remember” is curated and contested.
https://excavating.ai
Trevor Paglen. They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead (2019) Paglen traces how non-consensual mugshots (often of vulnerable people) fed facial recognition datasets. The work discloses a hidden economy where human likeness becomes extractive memory for surveillance industries. https://paglen.studio/2020/04/09/they-took-the-faces-from-the-accused-and-the-dead
Constant (Collective). The (In)visible Archive (2016)
Workshops, tools, and publications reimagining archival infrastructures so that overlooked lives and practices can be remembered. Constant models situated, feminist, and open approaches to building memory systems otherwise.
https://constantvzw.org
2) Embodied, Ephimeral & Perfomed Memory
Tino Sehgal. Constructed Situations (2002–ongoing)
Immaterial works that exist as live encounters and oral transmission only. By refusing documentation, Sehgal turns memory itself into the work’s archive, foregrounding presence, social choreography, and collective recall. www.juliet-artmagazine.com/en/tino-sehgal-constructed-situations
Tehching Hsieh. One Year Performances (1978–1986)
Extreme durational pieces – punching a time clock hourly, living outdoors, being tied to another artist – inscribe memory into body and time. The works test how repetition, endurance, and disappearance produce indelible traces. www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvebnkjwTeU
3) Collective Memory, Colonialism & Historical Trauma
William Kentridge. The Refusal of Time (2012)
An immersive installation of drawing, film, sculpture, and sound that resists linear time and the temporalities of empire. Kentridge composes a rhythmic, fragmented memory where histories are syncopated rather than sequenced. www.kentridge.studio/william-kentridge-projects/the-refusal-of-time
Rimini Protokoll. Remote X (2013–ongoing)
Headphone-guided city walks where participants move as a choreographed crowd. Personal memories mingle with scripted prompts, generating a temporary collective memory and a living archive of urban perception.
www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/de/project/remote-x
4) Material, Environmental & More-Than-Human Archives
Susan Schuppli. Atmospheric Feedback Loops (2017–ongoing)
Schuppli investigates how air, temperature, and matter record political events – fires, emissions, contaminants – treating the environment as witness. Memory appears as distributed inscription in planetary media, readable through sensors and images. https://susanschuppli.com/ATMOSPHERIC-FEEDBACK-LOOPS
Anaïs Tondeur. Invisible Landscapes (2014–ongoing)
Collaborating with scientists, Tondeur traces memory in particles, dust, and air. Her works materialise invisible histories – industrial, ecological, and atmospheric – through poetic evidentiary images and installations.
https://anaistondeur.com
Susan Hiller. From the Freud Museum (1991–1996)
A series of “memory boxes” combining found objects, notes, and artefacts. Hiller assembles intimate archives where personal, cultural, and institutional memories meet – incomplete, affective, and insistently material. www.susanhiller.org/installations/from_the_freud_museum.html
Johanna Rotko. Soil Archive (2021)
Collected soil samples become repositories of ecological and local histories. Rotko treats earth as a document – holding traces of human activity, pollution, care, and time beyond human lifespans.
www.johannarotko.com
Åsa Ståhl & Kristina Lindström. Un/Making Soil Communities (2019–ongoing) Workshops and installations explore composting as unarchiving: memory as digestion, decay, and transformation across species. The project models how more-than-human processes store, remix, and release histories. https://soil-laboratory.aalto.fi/un-making-soil-communities/index.html